Questions and postings pertaining to the usage of ImageMagick regardless of the interface. This includes the command-line utilities, as well as the C and C++ APIs. Usage questions are like "How do I use ImageMagick to create drop shadows?".

I was using imagemagick to capture screenshots in a program of mine, but I've since switched to using scrot because for some reason it appears nearly 5-10 times faster on average. I don't know if imagemagick can be improved in this way or not, but when taking 1 shot per second, it really adds up. I understand that scrot is a simpler program, so I expect it to a degree, but this large of a time difference?

I created a script to compare the time speeds of both programs taking a simple full screenshot. (script listed at end of post)

In other testing with capture and resize, there appears to be almost no performance boost for running imagemagick in a single command verses 2 commands. (Which makes scrot faster, even if we need to resize later with image magick)

Imagemagick and scrot are both written in C, so perhaps some middle ground could be met? If the time issue is based on cross platform compatibility, perhaps a .config file could be created once imagemagick knows what type of system it's on??

Chances are scrot reads directly from the frame buffer, whereas ImageMagick reads the screen through the X11 API for cross-platform compatibility. We are not inclined to write code specific to the Linux framebuffer so in this case we recommend scrot if your requirements are time critical.